Affiliation and short bio

Richard Morris is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the Caro Almela Catedratico at the Instituto de Neurosciencias in Alicante. He studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and did his D.Phil at the University of Sussex. His early career included a period helping to build an exhibition at the Natural History Museum and working for BBC Television, both in London, before taking up a Lectureship in Scotland. He retires from active university teaching in December 2023. His longstanding research interest is the neurobiology of cognition, particularly the role synaptic plasticity in memory formation, and how disorders in plasticity contributes to neurological disease. Beyond the lab, he set up Edinburgh Neuroscience in 2005 jointly with the clinical neurologist Charles Warlow which they directed together for its first 5 years, now one of the largest groups of neuroscientists in the United Kingdom. Outside Edinburgh, he served, by secondment, as Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust from 2007 to 2010 (the world’s second largest medical charity), where he helped to set up the new Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour at UCL and the new research charity MQ:Transforming Mental Health. He was a co-recipient with two prominent physiologists, Tim Bliss and Graham Collingridge, of the The Brain Prize (Lundbeck Foundation, Copenhagen).  He an elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1997, the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2007) and of the National Academy of Sciences (USA, 2020). He was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by the Queen in 2007. He lives in Edinburgh in Scotland and Chinchilla de Monte Aragon (CLM).